​​'Terence McKenna's True Hallucinations' and 'The Transcendental Object at the End of Time' are films about Terence McKenna and his relationship with brother Dennis, life, universe, and magic plants. Learn about the creator:We Plants are Happy Plants
Terence McKenna's final reflection on the self, excerpt from 'The Transcendental Object at the End of Time.'

Forty years after the Nixon administration effectively shut down research on psychedelic drugs, Roland Griffiths helped reopen it. One of the nation’s leading psychopharmacologists, Griffiths’ research focuses on the behavioral and subjective effects of mood-altering drugs. Griffiths was the 2015 Nathan B. Eddy Award winner from the College on Problems of Drug Dependence.

He is the lead investigator of the Psilocybin Research Initiative at Johns Hopkins, which includes studies of psilocybin occasioned mystical experience in healthy volunteers and cancer patients, and a pilot study of psilocybin-facilitated smoking cessation. He has been a consultant to the National Institutes of Health, and to numerous pharmaceutical companies in the development of new psychotropic drugs.

Roland Griffiths, Johns Hopkins University

Have you had a personal encounter with God or The Divine? Please consider responding to Dr. Griffiths' survey, found here. If you know of others who have ever had an experience of a personal divine encounter, please send them the link and encourage them to participate. This includes people who had such an experience long ago. ​Special message from Roland Griffiths: "My colleagues and I at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine are conducting a fascinating, important, anonymous, internet-based survey to characterize experiences that some people have of a personal encounter with God. The study will permit a better understanding about the phenomenology, interpretation, and enduring effects of such encounters." Learn more by watching the video below.

Personal Look at the McKenna Brothers: Terence McKenna's True Hallucinations and The Transcendental Object at the End of Time

Dr. Dennis McKenna’s research has focused on the interdisciplinary study of Amazonian ethnopharmacology and plant hallucinogens. He has conducted extensive ethnobotanical fieldwork in the Peruvian, Colombian, and Brasilian Amazon.

The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss. Click for link.

McKenna's doctoral research (University of British Columbia, 1984) focused on the ethnopharmacology of ayahuasca and oo-koo-he, two tryptamine-based hallucinogens used by indigenous peoples in the Northwest Amazon. He is a founding board member of the Heffter Research Institute, and was a key organizer and participant in the Hoasca Project, the first biomedical investigation of ayahuasca used by the UDV, a Brazilian religious group. He is currently Assistant Professor in the Center for Spirituality and Healing at the University of Minnesota.

The big challenge in neuroscience for the 21st century is to understand consciousness. How does what we know about the brain—which is quite a lot but still an incomplete picture—translate into our experience of being a conscious entity? That’s the holy grail of neuroscience.

These psychedelic compounds are to the study of consciousness what the telescope is to astronomy.

​The set is really everything you bring to it. Who you are, what your expectation is, it's you. It's your mindset and everybody's mindset is different. Terence told me once when we were young, before I'd ever taken LSD. He said, "Don't take LSD until you've ready 'Psychology and Alchemy,'" by Jung. And we were reading Jung at that time. He said, "Don't take LSD until you've ready 'Psychology and Alchemy,' you'll get much more out of it if you do that." Well, I hadn't read Psychology and Alchemy when I took them the first time. But later I did and I realized what he meant. A lot of the things that came up... Psychology and Alchemy is a kind of a good map for a lot of the gestalts and ideas that come up during a psychedelic experience.

In the video below, UBC professor Zach Walsh takes a fresh look at psychedelic drugs as he leads a research study that reveals the use of hallucinogens may help curb violence against intimate partners.

Past president of the American Psychiatric Association, Jeffrey Lieberman, M.D., said about classic hallucinogen research in a July 2015 Medscape blog post:

We have had a nearly 50-year hiatus in any serious investigation, except for some heroic investigators at a few universities, primarily in Europe but also in the United States.

​I believe that the scientific investigation of mind-altering psychedelic drugs in the 1960s and '70s was a truncated but promising avenue of research, and that these medications, these drugs, could have significant value for a variety of indications if studied adequately... Until we have studied them, however, it is not prudent for any proposals for these to be used on an ad hoc experimental basis. They need to be studied, and we need to determine for what purposes they should be used and what risks and benefits are associated with these treatments.

Lieberman describes the impact that LSD and Freud had on his decision to enter the field of mental health:

My trip did produce one lasting insight, though--one that I remain grateful for to this day...I marveled at the fact that [if] such an incredibly minute amount of a chemical...could so dramatically alter my cognition, the chemistry of the brain must be susceptible to pharmacologic manipulations in other ways, including ways that could be therapeutic.

Below: Slide from psilocybin researcher Robin Carhart-Harris' presentation to the Czech Psychedelic Society, Psychedelics in Science and Medicine. More about research of psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression below.

​We’re especially curious about your research into the connections between psilocybin, spirituality, and consciousness. Can you tell us more? Are there any updates?

In ongoing studies, we’re examining the effects of psilocybin in long-term meditators and in ​religious leaders from the major faith traditions. We’re also conducting two anonymous internet surveys. One is asking about experiences that some people report of an encounter with God, or the God of their understanding.

Another is examining anomalous experiences, such as Near Death Experiences, that produce enduring changes in people’s attitudes and beliefs about death and dying. In both surveys, we want to compare spontaneously occurring experiences with psychedelically occasioned ones. Our hope is that these surveys will allow us to better understand such experiences and how they may differ across faith traditions and occasioning events (e.g. prayer, meditation, spontaneously-occurring, nature experiences, drug-occasioned, etc.). Our research has shown that a single experience with psilocybin can produce personally meaningful experiences accompanied by enduring positive changes in attitudes, mood and behavior.

Finally, we’re initiating a study to explore the efficacy of psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression. (continued below).

​The United States is home to a terribly deficient mental health care system that has shown no significant progress in the treatment of mental illness in the past 4 decades. The annual cost by 2030 of mental illness will exceed $6 trillion. Treatment with antidepressants are trial and error and may take 8, 10, or 12 weeks to see an effect, if any, while benzos are addictive and play a part in 8,000 overdose deaths a year. In spite of this, U.S. drug laws are the greatest barrier to meaningful research with non-addictive classic hallucinogens like psilocybin, ayahuasca, and DMT. Robin Carhart-Harris discusses a preliminary open label study using psilocybin to treat depression and compares it to an early study with ketamine, a Schedule III dissociative hallucinogen and anesthetic called "one of the most significant advances in the field of depression in recent years."

Griffiths continues:In several of our studies we are using fMRI brain imaging methods to examine the acute and persisting changes in brain function that occur after receiving psilocybin.

Why study mystical experiences? What does this work mean to you?

Many of the challenges facing the world today, such as the environmental crisis and hostilities within and between cultures, stem from a lack of appreciation for the profound interconnectedness of all people and all things. This sense of interconnectedness or unity is a core feature of the world’s ethical and moral systems. Our interconnectedness is also a core feature of the mystical or transcendent experiences that occur with high probability after the ingestion of psilocybin under appropriate conditions. Ultimately, systematic prospective study of mystical experiences and their consequences may be critical to the survival of our species and the healing of our planet. Read the full Griffiths interview.

The Default Mode Network & End of Suffering: Experienced meditator Gary Weber talks about the effects of meditation, psilocybin, ayahuasca, on connectivity of the default mode network and cingulate cortex, areas of the brain responsible for the sense of self.

Hallucinations have a bad reputation in Western culture

Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) attempts to manipulate brain circuitry in the same therapeutic way as psilocybin and ayahuasca, without the hallucinations.

30 Years of Futility in Mental Health: AZT and Prozac were invented in the same year. While patients with HIV have seen good health outcomes, those with mental illness have not been getting better. That’s according to Dr. Amit Etkin, assistant professor of psychiatry at Stanford University. In this video for the World Economic Forum, Etkin explains why he thinks mental illness is not caused by chemical imbalance, but by faulty neural circuits. TMS isn't cheap and it takes multiple sessions to see an effect, if any.

How deficient is mental health care in the United States, and how clueless are healthcare professionals and policymakers in their understanding of the brain?